The Legend of Zelda
by Phanto
Summary: Novelisation. UPDATE//Taking a while, but trust me there is a lot of writing being done. The introduction is being re-written in a fashion I envision as better, and I skipped ahead a little to write Link's trek to the first Level.
1. Argument

Argument

_It always strikes me as absurd how much Zelda fans seem to forget the original classic. Of course, these days, it's difficult to remember the Nintendo. More and more, fans are being raised on the console wars of the year 2000 and the glory of the Famicon fades._

_That, essentially, is why I am writing this. _

_I am a fan of the series, always have been, but the original still holds weight in my heart. The illinearity, perhaps? For the only time in the series, the Nintendo classic presents you with a world completely open for exploration. You are neither given a list of things to do or places to go, nor are given any hint of where you should head next. The underworlds were hidden away and you did not quest for them, you stumbled over them – so that you might complete Level 1, and then Level 2, but then run into Level 5 or 6 long before being equipped for either. There was a map present with the instruction guide, of course, but for those who just got a random copy that was for naught. There was no Internet, either. _

_I remember drawing my _own_ freaking map. I remember arguing with friends – because back then, the Nintendo was fucking huge, and at school recess if anyone had found the legendarily hidden Level 9 they had stories to tell – about the location of items, et cetera. _

_It'll be hard for kids these days – with their Internet and fluffy spoon-to-mouth strategy guides, to play the 8-bit Legend of Zelda and be really immersed in the experience. But young and with an absence of powerful technology the bits and bytes and textures of Hyrule became a sprawling fantasy universe. The dungeons, with their solemn funeral dirge-ambiance, were horrifying – and being set upon by any kind of new enemy sprite was just as nerve-fraying as running from the zombies in Resident Evil 4.Especially with your feeble life expectancy. _

_This also presents, as I've stated before, an opportunity of waiting creativity. With only a limited outline to march out on, the plot of the game was as expected of NES games, pretty limited. For one, who are those random old people? Why are there no towns, why are you even _there_? The idea of re-envisioning this game, through literature, has been nagging at me for a long while. I've looked at the maps, I've read some of the older plot summaries, and more importantly I've completely ignored the hordes of timeline theories which defy the very purpose of the series as a whole. _

_As a preliminary disclaimer? All you hardcore fans turn off your compendium of knowledge. It doesn't apply. _

_This novelisation is really just as realistic a fantasy portrayal I can make of the game-series. Above all else, it's for fun. Ever notice how your rupees are depleted every time you fire an arrow? Ever wonder if that's because Link is using sharpened rupees as arrowheads? That's the kind of Hyrule I'm imagining – the barbaric, southern continent, uninhabited where the northern continent holds the castle and cities of the kingdom. Just like before, when I was kid, I read Jeff Rovin's _How To Win At Nintendo Games_, a novel about getting high scores but vividly describing games like LoZ through words without visual aid. I suppose inherently that would be the guiding principle behind this. _

_So, enjoy: enjoy a realistic portrayal of geography, of the bestiary, of the items, the faeries, the drama and the story behind The Legend of Zelda (NES). Let's hope I keep it going, eh? _


	2. Prologue

_The Legend of Zelda ---_

Because he was the king, his decision reigned. Because he was the king he said nothing. He did not go to his daughter, Zelda, and comfort her, as the instinct of fatherhood dictated he should. Instead, he merely watched; a stone by her side. Few were present in the tower room – the Tower of Wisdom, the highest building built upwards from the walls of Hyrule Castle. It overlooked the land with a vernacular eye and regal indifference – so that its green fields flowed out from their city in knolls, that the five cities Darunia, Rauru, Ruto, Nabooru, Saria thrived across the two northern continents, so that the overarching silhouette of Death Mountain to the south was kept under... watch. There were three walls to the room – the floor was triangular and bore chiselled into its tiles the frescoes and mosaics depicting ancient history, the myth of creation, the legendary Triforce whole where it would never have been dreamed so.

The windows built into its walls were positioned to so that regardless of its location in the sky the sun – the Eye of Din – shone into the middle of the chamber, and at night that the moonlight did likewise. All around them dust tossed about like golden sand, but none paid it heed. Their attention was rapt drawn to the artefact on the pedestal – hovering, an emerald pyramid of glass which opalesced and weaved its light about so there was no geometry to its surface – only solid, blinding white-green fire.

The Triforce of Wisdom.

There was no choice, not any more. It could not fall into His hands, and thus must be hidden away. Must be lost, like the Triforce of Courage before it.

Because he was the king he had ordered his daughter to go through with it, and because she was his daughter she did so without disobedience, without visible grief. She held herself with Tyrian nobility, her golden hair spilled curled from her shoulders over a silky gown of white and green and gold. On the back of her hand, the mark, the triangle, seemed to pull her arm forward to touch the blazing jewel's solid face. She did not draw back.

Because he was the king, he did not weep.

He had written his final orders – his will – and sealed the letter in the sacred blood of his lineage. The Triforce would be broken, by his daughter, into eight pieces. The three popes – of Farore, Din, and Nayru – and their vicars would send the pieces south, by sea, into the wilderness of the ancient continent. And there, following what existed of the maps, the fragments would be buried in the bowels of the underworlds, the sunken continents. There, with them, they would be entombed. The price of their knowledge hung heavy.

Though He uproot the earth entire and spread his desert to both continents, He would never find them.

Zelda, too, would go south, through the uncharted wilderness of Olde Hyrule, seek Catina, Holodrum, Labrynna; the neighbour lands. She would be safe, goddesses.

But because he was the king, he would stay. His armour did not rust, neither did his sword. He would wait in Hyrule, for Him, the gerudo king. Mandrag Ganon. Wait, by the point of spear. Din help the madman. Din help his black army. Because he was the king, by last breath and blood he would defend the kingdom.

He watched as the jewel fractured – not violently, but in gorgeous silence – watched the pieces hang disembodied over their pedestal beneath his daughter's touch. He closed his eyes.

Because he was the king, he alone would die for Hyrule.

Ex. Circa XXVVXX HYRULE

_Beneath the Hebra mountain chain__ in Olde Hyrule, which has always been known as 'Death Mountain', the desert of the gerudo lies toiling beneath the great Eye of Din, a molten coin swung high into the blameless emptiness of the sky. Its sands spill and swirl in nimbuses, sweep the land clean of life. Beneath its philistine heat the earth cracks, bleeds dust, the scabrous boulders and lurid dunes which carpet the landscape splinter, home only to the terrible denizens which crave their shade. When the sun rises, a great wind breathes from the lungs of the earth, carrying with it the mountain chain's terrible namesake, and when it sets, the night brings no solace – the sand... fractures with cold, the rock whitens with a necrosis of frost, and the bones of the beasts subject to the desert's terrible will, freeze. _

_Death... has always been the way of life for that part of Hyrule. _

_It is the irony of our creation that Din, the goddess of fire who forged this land tempered from the void which flourishes so beautifully so that it is the envy of all others, has chosen the shadow of that mountain as her place of worship. Power. In the absence of life, in the absence of beauty, of luxury, only power remains – in the rock, the sand, the mountain, in death. The gerudo have always been her people, the woman-tribe of thieves and warrioresses and bandits under their dark kings. The gerudo... the darkness... Din smiles on them. Nihilistic, ruthless bitch-goddess. We worship her beauty but her will is dark. She smiles on them and has always smiled on them and even now, in Hyrule's anguish, she smiles on her child – the bandit king, the thief-prince, Mandrag Ganon. Hyrule dies. _

_Hyrule dies, and now, so do we. We, immortal children of the forest, the kokiri, know the agony of mortality. My flesh; wrinkled, rugose, like tattered parchment from the creaking knobs of bone which make my skeleton, my hair; grey and white and dead. My mind; soft... blank... spaces where once I could remember all the names given to the beasts and birds and stones... blank... spaces where there should be the pictures of my youth. I remember... playing... running... the forest. It pains me. I have wept, it seems, all that I can. Now I can only wander through my forests. They are beautiful – sunlight, gold, dusty, falls in aureate streams of ochre from savage breaks in the canopies. Motes of leaves and flowers and pollen light up like match-heads and dance before my eyes. Curtains of moss and creepers cradle in my hands. I can smell the flowers. I smell... the soil. I feel the knotted trunks of the oaks and firs and pines, they groan beneath my palms and where my flesh meets their flesh life springs anew – buds and roots take seed in the bark, tiny flowers bloom. I listen to them, the trees. They creak and whisper and I know another of my line has passed into the earth. The leafs flutter and sigh, and another. Soon, my time will come. But here, in my sanctuaries, I am powerful again. My flesh, not wrinkled, I am a man. I am not a child... but neither am I... a wretch. _

_What faith have I in the goddesses? _

_What faith is there left to have, that the third Piece is still lost to the world? Courage has fled the land, and our hearts. Wisdom... lost. All that remains is Power. Power, nestled in the bowels of Death Mountain. Power remains. Din remains. This is her land, now. And it rots in her care. The popes and vicars of Din rule in the North. Farore and Nayru have turned away. The fae fountains are drying... the earth rots from within, the wind tastes fell on my tongue. The forests lavish in unknown pain. _

_My thoughts... grow dull._

_My memories are full of light. They are the only candles I have, in this darkness. The memories of my childhood dance vibrant, still images, so full of light. It is ironic that though scarce these ancient images hold precedence. My recent memories... My... adulthood; hot, shadowed things – images seen through fire. I sleep for long periods at a time. In a grotto, in the earth, a womb of the earth. The smell of roots and soil is powerful here. There are crystals, and when I whisper I see myself running, carefree, I see the forest in their facets._

_That is the first spell I ever learned._

_It is the last to be forgotten._

_But today... tonight... the crystals show me nothing. Is this it? Is this where I die? I am ready to die. The world is not a place I enjoy living in, anymore. I wonder always whether I am the last of the kokiri, but always another dies on the wind and I hear. _

_No._

_The crystals... speak._

_Not my childhood._

_The images are hot, and shadows. Like... pictures seen through fire._

_But... bright. Ever so._

_A man? A boy?_

_Whom? _


	3. One

I

Wet snow crunched under his sandaled foot, sliding heavily down the eroding rock face into the brush below. Behind him, the airy bluffs of the un-christened mountains which cauterised the peninsula before him from the known lands beyond quivered soundlessly in the thin air, splintered, offended with cold. The teetering, rock-ridden passes cut through the cliff-sides like folds in a fat man's belly, narrow and icy, offering no promise of foliage; only the frost-whitened skeletons of trees and the open howl of the wind. They were young, nihilistic peaks; and in their youth they forgave few mistakes.

But they were behind him now. He vagranted no longer in the company of eagles, stood no longer above the yawning chasms and coulee formations where the clouds pooled beneath him like lakes of frothing white. The rock had become smashed, un-proud, tumbled and fallen, as the glaciers which strangled their lofts turned to streams and trickles and falls of rushing water. Even now, rivulets flowed prettily between his ankles, droplets ticked from the salivating lip of melting snow, trickling into the broken, preliminary edge of forest-land which cut upwards through the fractured stone in rows of pines like feathered combs. The north-east horizon sprawled wide open – hazy with mist, a gorgeous, savage world.

He had lost all concept of time. How long he'd travelled, how far. He had become disciplined. He ate little, drank little, observed coolly as his body craved nourishment – chewed strips of rawhide cord to assuage hunger while his stomach sucked emptily in his belly like a shallow drain. He'd thread strange lands underfoot – abandoned, ancient cities where the ghosts of exhumed civilisations had peered at him from the shadows of window-panes. Crossed flat wastes of white sand without any clear cardinal orientation. Huddled close to his campfire sleeping gitfully through the sounds and calls of beasts foreign to his ear. A forest, where the trees grew so high their timbres vanished into the clouds and their roots tore the ground asunder them like savaged flesh. The mountains. Sometimes, the cliffs sang to him in the night, and laughed, and when he woke their tors had shifted into odd angles and the very geography around him had been maimed.

Belts heavy with packs, satchels, water-skins, swung tight to his hips and chest. High on his back perched his ruck; blanket and bedroll, flat _yuean_ bread and salted jerky, bags of rice and nuts, tools, knives. Tied down against this with heavy leather was an old and unpolished shield of tarnished bronze, and wood. His neck and most of his face were scarved, long, Hylian ears curled under frayed bandanas. His fists, gloved. Everything about him was weathered from travelling, seemed to come apart at the seams. His body was sheathed in muscle and trimmed of all superfluous material – trimmed to preserve its host, burning everything into the blast-furnace of digestion to fuel its terrible momentum. The Eye of Din (for He, too, knew Din) had barely risen in the east and pre-morning mists hovered about him as he made his way down the steppe. The morning was quiet – except for the gurgling of streams, and the gurgling of his belly, which were deafening in the shadow of peace. Far below, in the tree-line, the birds could be heard. Crows, _rraaawking_ their atonal caws.

But nothing seemed new to him... this kingdom, cut off from the world continent... he had seen these pines, these bluffs, this steppe; in his dreams. Dreams of a girl, a golden haired siren who wept alone, a ray of light alone in shadow – dreams of _love_, and _lust_, which lit inside his belly like the striking of matches so that he snapped awake before dawn, that the echoes of malnourishment rang hollow from his skull. They came more frequently, now, the dreams – they lit against his eyes even as he walked, came to him while he lay awake – visions of gold, of sex, of beauty, obsession.

Dreams of shapes. Of triangles.

And dark dreams. Nightmares. Apocalyptic visions of red... and black...

He shuddered reflexively, and made his way down the mountain side with renewed vigour. He had come at least, and his dreams lay before him like ripened fruits. The breeze kicked up behind him – shedding flakes from the slick drifts of snow which piled about. They both travelled north-east on the same compass. The wind must dream, too, he thought.


End file.
